I ❤️ Radiation Accidents

Like imagine you spend most if not all of your childhood hearing "don't feed the bears" and all the reasons why that's a terrible idea. So okay you agree, while life might sometimes present the temptation to feed some bears it's a bad idea and you'll never do it. Still plenty of ways to enjoy nature, after all!

Then one morning you wake up and all the adults and organizations who spent so much time and energy on hammering home that you never, ever, ever feed the bears, are enthusing over this new Bear Feeding Park! Where all you do all day long is go feed bears! And absolutely you must get to the Bear Feeding Park and start hanging out there and throwing parties there and feeding bears, making sure all the important milestones of your life or even just mundane things feature, to some extent, a visit to Bear Feeding Park. Where you feed bears.

And you're like... well, if nothing else, is it somehow less dangerous to feed bears now? The answer to which is no. Not at all. Bear attacks skyrocket to an all-time high and stay there. Somehow this does not actually seem to deter anyone. You suggest that maybe this is a sign that Bear Feeding Park is a bad idea and people are like, oh no, we just need to find other ways to stay Bear Aware. We can't give up going to Bear Feeding Park, after all! You can't get hired unless you've got a good reputation at Bear Feeding Park!

For context, my mom is the one who taught me to forage, and it was and is just part of life. She regularly added foraged foods to our everyday meals. I knew how to identify huckleberry before I learned the alphabet. Foraging was just another part of feeding ourselves, along with gardening, raising chickens, and going to the store. And the firmest rule was that you didn't eat a plant unless you were willing to bet your life on it being what you thought it was.

So to watch my coworker see a berry, say 'strawberry!' and then pick it and have it three quarters of the way to his mouth before I could point out that it was actually an unripe blackberry...

Well, it was a striking moment. Because while that particular mix up would not actually hurt you, the lack of paying attention it takes to mistake an unripe blackberry for a strawberry and the lack of caution it takes to put a plant that you've hardly looked at into your mouth- no wonder some people think bittersweet nightshade is a look alike to red huckleberry!

And it explains a lot about how secretive most people are about their foraging spots. If you don't care enough about your own health and well-being to actually look at the plant you're eating, how could I trust you to care for the health and well-being of the plants you want to forage and the ecosystems you want to forage from? I want my foraging spots to be better off for my interactions with them. I want to be able to go back to the same spots year after year and decade after decade and see the native plants thriving, the invasive species losing ground, and the biodiversity increasing.

In August Amir gets his own Nightwave!

Plus he'll get his own room in the mall where you can play a text-based Fables & Frontiers